Two Texas universities studying ancient spear tips found in northwest Alaska have raised intriguing questions about how people spread throughout the Americas.

A research team led by Texas A&M University Professor Ted Goebel has been analyzing "fluted," or grooved, stone spear points discovered in 2005 at Bering Land Bridge Preserve on the Seward Peninsula.

Archaeologists with the National Park Service, who are also participating in the study, found a fluted spear tip fragment in an area called Serpentine Hot Springs, according to an A&M news release.

Goebel and the team later excavated the site and found more fluted spear tips, which are recognized as a hallmark of North American Paleoindian cultures, the release said.

Carbon-dating of charred animal bones as well as charcoal found with the spear tips proves humans were on the land bridge by the end of the Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago, Goebel said.

"So the question becomes, 'Who were these people, and where did they come from?' " Goebel said.

The evidence from the Serpentine area in Alaska raises new possibilities about when people first settled the Bering land bridge, known as Beringia, and where they came from.

"Not all of Beringia's early residents may have come from Siberia, as we have traditionally thought," Goebel said. "Some may have come from America instead, although millennia after the initial migration across the land bridge from Asia."

Goebel says that among the earliest residents of North America were members of the Clovis culture, thought to date to about 13,000 years ago.

The Clovis culture refers to people who used stone spear tips with fluted bases, initially found near Clovis, N.M., and later found in Alaska.

No one has been able to determine whether the fluted points found in Alaska were younger, the same age as, or older than those found in more temperate North America, Goebel said.

If the fluted points do not represent a human migration, they at least indicate the surprisingly early spread of an American technology into Arctic Alaska, Goebel said.

Fluted spear points have not been found in neighboring Chukotka, in Russia, suggesting that the people who made the fluted tips never made it further west than the Seward Peninsula, the release said.

By 12,000 years ago, the land bridge was becoming swamped by the rising Bering and Chukchi seas, according to the release.